Win Business & Retain Clients With WooRank's SEO Audit

The key to successfully pitching to a new client is anticipating client needs and challenges, and providing a solution. One of the best tools on your toolbelt here is the SEO audit. Incorporating an audit into your pitch makes you look good for two reasons:

Answering a question before it’s asked, or even before someone knows it needs to be asked, makes you look good. It will show that you have expertise, or at least knowledge, of working with businesses, products and/or industries similar to theirs. Plus, showing that you took the time and effort to learn about an organization is a sign that you take their project seriously.

Providing information on how to make a decision makes people much more like to decide on you. It may sound counterintuitive to give away advice for free during a pitch, but really, it’s Sales 101. The more you’re able to simplify the decision-making process, the more authoritative you’ll appear on the subject (in this case, SEO services).

However, as you most likely know as an SEO pro yourself, taking the effort to audit the site of someone who’s not paying you is not always the best use of your time. That’s where WooRank comes in. It gives you a granular look at a website’s on-page SEO, technical SEO and link profile all at once.

Most importantly, you’ll be able to add your own colors and branding to these audits so it looks like you did all the work. The white label PDF reports also let you customize your template so you can add your own logo, cover and closing pages, and tailor the audit to include only the criteria you want to focus on. It’s ok to put your name on it, WooRank is here to help you succeed.

No need to use multiple crawlers or analytics reports, and then strongarm them into your own template. Here are five ways WooRank’s automated SEO tools will help you win, and keep, clients.

1. Technical SEO Made Easy

Technical SEO is essential to getting a site to rank well in Google search results since page’s technical factors determines how well crawlers are able to access and index content, or if they can at all. Unfortunately for SEO agencies and freelancers, many non-search marketers don’t understand how a site’s code, sitemap, URL structure can impact a site’s ranking the same as content quality, keyword use and link building. So step one is showing a new potential client how improving their page’s technical SEO will help them:

Meta tags: See how well a page’s title tag and description are optimized, and call out those that are too long or too short to be effective. The WooRank audit will even simulate the page’s search snippet, so you can show clients a tangible example of how these tags work.

URL optimization: Find out if a page has implemented a WWW resolve, uses query strings or has underscores, which can result in search engines indexing duplicate content or incorrectly interpreting keywords.

Robots.txt & Sitemap: Quickly not only if a site has a robots.txt file and XML sitemap, but also find their URLs so you can audit these two important files. Since you don’t have access to a site’s Google Search Console data, going through a sitemap and/or robots.txt file will help you point out areas that might not be getting crawled, or find pages that are showing up in search results when the website owner might not want.

Mobile friendliness: Lots of technical factors go into determining whether a page is mobile friendly or not. Audit font size and tap targets and see if there’s any special content (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) that affects mobile rendering. Finally, check for responsive design by looking for the viewport and find technical problems that increase load time.

Structured data:Semantic markup can be a powerful tool for optimizing a brand or site’s rich snippets and and knowledge graph information. However, if you’re pitching to a lead that isn’t particularly web-savvy, they might not know if their site has structured data. Instead of combing through a site, find what markup a page is using in their WooRank audit.

2. Instant On-Page Audit & Link Analysis

With the technical audit covered, you can finally move on to cover what might be the juiciest part for someone looking for SEO help: keywords, links and page speed. Almost anyone looking to improve their search optimization is going to want to hear about these three things:

Keyword consistency: Many website owners are still operating under the old world order of keyword and synonym density. WooRank’s Keyword Consistency criteria will help you evaluate a page’s keyword usage, while at the same time embodying the concept to someone who might not be completely SEO-savvy.

Backlinks: Everyone who wants SEO services worries about their link profile. Showing up to the pitch with the ability to provide them with the results of a link audit is a great way to inspire confidence in your abilities as a marketer. With the WooRank audit, you have a ready-built link analysis baked right into the report, so you get to show up to your pitch with an evaluation of the client’s overall link profile, and a rating of the value of each link that you can pass off as your own.

Site speed: Page load time is one of your most important SEO and usability factors. No one likes waiting for a page to load, not even robots. If your potential client has a slow page, don’t bother digging around in Chrome’s Developer Console to find the cause; possible speed optimizations are right there in the audit.

3. Side-By-Side Competitor Analysis

Everyone is looking for a little bit of competitive intelligence. Provide your prospective clients with some competitive analysis in their initial SEO audit. WooRank’s audit will give you the opportunity to provide clients with a side-by-side comparison with up to three competitors during the pitch. Show potential business how they stack up in the most important areas:

Keywords: Look at the competition’s title tags, meta descriptions and on-page content to see what keywords they’re targeting and see how the client fares head to head.

Usability: Even if the client’s site is fast, they could still be getting blown out of the water by their competition, putting them at a significant disadvantage. It’s well-known that every second of latency costs businesses major revenue, and being slower than the competition means customers could be turning to them to avoid wait times.

Links: Having a high-quality link profile is now much more important than having a large link profile (although, of course, having both is ideal). However, just as important is having a better link profile than the competition. With WooRank’s audit you’ll see who’s got more links, who’s got better links and who has more linking domains, all integral ingredients to a healthy link profile.

4. Keep SEO Simple and Clear

SEO terminology can frighten and confuse unfrozen cavemen lawyers and other non-SEO types. When pitching your SEO services to potential clients, explaining these terms and concepts to lay people can be a challenge. For example, telling someone they need to conduct a link audit and reclaim lost links in order to increase their site’s link juice could result in a few blank stares. And recommending a site add alternative text to optimize their images might raise some questions instead of providing insight.

No worries though. Take advantage of the WooRank SEO Guides to help explain these SEO concepts. Every SEO guide will provide you with a definition, the reason why it’s important for search marketing and how your client can use it to improve their rankings. Even more abstract concepts such as the aforementioned link juice and mobile friendliness have fast, simple and easy-to-understand explanations written for SEO outsiders.

5. Track their progress

So you’ve audited the lead’s website, checked their links, added their competitors for comparison and made the pitch. So what now? The key to maintaining the relationship and winning continuing business is to show clients the impact of your services. You know what that means: tracking and reporting.

Keyword Tool: Any client using an SEO vendor is going to want to know first and foremost how their rankings are improving. Add their target keywords to Keyword Tool to monitor ranking, compare it to their historical performance and see any ground gained or loss relative to the competition.

Weekly Email Digest: Reduce the amount of time spent on updating clients using WooRank’s Weekly Email Digest. Receive weekly updates about keyword performance, traffic, onsite behavior, landing page performance and social media analytics. Send this digest on to your clients so they get a weekly update on how their site is doing, at no extra effort to you.

Uptime Monitoring: Sites that experience a significant amount of downtime risk being removed from Google’s Index. Keep an eye on your clients’ sites (without using any of your actual eyes) with WooRank’s Uptime Monitoring and receive a warning any time the site goes down. Then, once you’ve solved the problem, get another notification that the site has been restored. Alerting a client to any site downtime will always make a marketer look good.

Not Just For Freelancers

So, for agencies and freelancers incorporating the white label SEO audit into your pitch will boost your chances of winning new business and retaining current clients. But what if you’re an in-house marketer? Luckily for you, you don’t need to pitch your services, but our customizable audit will still help you when making presentations and reports for the higher-ups.

Our audit gives you a list of specific, actionable steps you can take to improve your marketing, and all the tools and features mentioned above will help you achieve buy-in from managers and other stakeholders when proposing an SEO campaign. Plus, you can track your WooRank score, keyword rankings and site analytics to show your progress to your boss. Bosses love progress.